Rachel, the Market pig, is in the money

Rachel's snout has always been a magnet for children's curious fingers. The bronze pig has collected $120,000 since it was installed in 1986.

Rachel's snout has always been a magnet for children's curious fingers. The bronze pig has collected $120,000 since it was installed in 1986.

Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Rachel's snout has always been a magnet for children's curious fingers. The bronze pig has collected $120,000 since it was installed in 1986.

Rachel's snout has always been a magnet for children's curious fingers. The bronze pig has collected $120,000 since it was installed in 1986.

Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Rachel, the Market pig, is in the money

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One recent morning, the mystery unfolded at Pike Place Market, as it does a couple of times a week.

Mostly, Rainelle Sizemore spends her time tracking donations to the Market Foundation, which supports affordable and low-income housing and social services at the Market.

But Sizemore is also the one who opens Rachel, the bronze piggy bank at the Market's entrance.

"A few weeks ago," she said, "I found a $100 bill."

A little earlier, as she headed down the stairs from the foundation's offices on the third floor, key in hand, four children stood in front of the pig, vacation-picture smiles on their faces.

It's easy to see the pig, like the Market itself, as a tourist attraction.

But Rachel also is a link between the Market's different sides.

At street level are shops and stalls of flowers and vegetables. In the apartments on the upper floors of the Market's buildings are small rooms, where the elderly and the poor live out their days.

People get their drink on at Kells and at The Pink Door on cobblestone-lined Post Alley. Nearby, at the Pike Market Medical Clinic, the homeless -- and increasingly, downtown workers with no health insurance -- wait for the doctor.

The Market always has had those contrasts.

Before voters passed the 1971 initiative to declare the Market a landmark, and save it from a developer's designs, the upstairs apartments were home to merchant seamen, said Marlys Erickson, executive director of the Market Foundation.

That initiative not only called for Market preservation for small shops and farmers' stalls, but also for low-income housing and social services.

In response to cuts in federal social services funding, the foundation was created in 1982 to raise money for those causes, and now supports the Downtown Food Bank, the Pike Market Medical Clinic, the Pike Market Senior Center, Pike Market Child Care and Clinic, and the Heritage House, an assisted living facility for 64 low-income seniors.

Finding federal funds scarce during the Reagan administration, the foundation came up with the idea for the piggy bank.

To create Rachel, there was an artists' design competition. "We had some interesting submissions," Erickson recalled.

"I remember one that was Plexiglas and you could see the change bounce through the pig's intestines. But you could see how much money was in there."

Georgia Gerber, an artist living on Whidbey Island, won the competition. She modeled Rachel after "a pig that lived down the road from her," Erickson said. "She was an Island County Fair winner, so she was a really good-looking pig."

Mostly, Sizemore and Erickson said, they've found money in the pig -- about $120,000 in change, dollars and the occasional hundred since she was installed in 1986. The foundation spends $1 million annually.

"The oddest thing I've ever found?" Sizemore said. "A few months ago, around the holidays, I found a lot of people had dropped notes in."

The notes were wet from rain, which had gotten into the pig and smeared the writing.

"The one thing we messed up is that we didn't get Rachel under the shelter, so rain gets in," Erickson said.

Sizemore said it seemed like the notes "were written to people who had died, because they used to meet them at the Market, or because they'd liked the Market."

But on this day last month -- no notes.

Sizemore turned the key in a lock on the pig's back, and with a screwdriver, she pried a box out of Rachel's back.